Raptors get Real in pre-season opener but without Jonas Valanciunas

Raptors get Real in pre-season opener but without Jonas Valanciunas

TORONTO — If this is how Jonas Valanciunas pictured his NBA career starting, he is in possession of a sharp sense of pessimism. Of course, that might just make him more relatable to the browbeaten fans of Toronto professional athletics.

Anyway, there was Valanciunas, The Great Lithuanian Hope, on the court at the Air Canada Centre about two hours before game time. Certainly, he thought that the first pre-season game, with visiting Real Madrid playing their final of two games in North America, would mark the beginning of his Toronto career. Instead, he was doing conditioning drills with director of sports science Alex McKechnie. There were wind sprints and work with medicine balls, all of which looked like the opposite of fun.

By the end of his session, sweat was pouring off of his face.

“He really needs to get out there,” Raptors coach Dwane Casey said. Valanciunas has not even had an official practice yet because of a strained calf he suffered the week before training camp began. “We don’t want to rush him. But at the same time, to get him used to the speed of the NBA, the physicality of the NBA, the strength of the guys in the NBA, banging and hitting, he needs that.”

Related

Raptors fans who attended the pre-season opener, a sometimes-entertaining, oft-sloppy 102-95 victory, did not get a chance to see Valanciunas or Kyle Lowry, the team’s two biggest additions to this year’s squad. Lowry’s strained adductor — inner thigh — will keep him out of at least the team’s first three pre-season games this week. The fans narrowly avoided seeing the game lose a little more shine, when Jose Calderon was able to shake off an ankle injury in the third quarter. DeMar DeRozan, who scored a game-high 18 points, used the word “rusty” four times in about 90 seconds to describe the game. He was not wrong.

Valanciunas is a bigger loss than Lowry in the interim, and not just for the rookie’s sake. Lowry will almost surely start, and will be in a point-guard rotation with Jose Calderon. That is obvious, and Casey can figure out their distribution of minutes with little trouble.

Up front will be the bigger challenge. Assuming he can stay healthy, Andrea Bargnani will play about 35 minutes per night. Bargnani is one of the few Raptors who can create offence for himself. Ergo, he will play plenty.

The mathematics from there are pretty simple. There are 96 minutes up for grabs each game for the Raptors’ big men. Assuming 35 minutes for Bargnani, that leaves 61 the likes of Amir Johnson, Aaron Gray, Ed Davis and, when he returns, Valanciunas. You can bank on them not splitting those minutes evenly.

“There are going to be nights, especially in the Eastern Conference, where a [tradional centre] like Aaron is going to be meaningful,” Casey said. “We’ve got guys like [Indiana’s Roy] Hibbert, [Brooklyn’s Brook] Lopez, the big, strong, bulky centres in the Eastern Conference. But then there are going to be nights when JV and Amir are more meaningful, when they’ve got some smaller bigs, or when teams go small.”

The Raptors have to hope that Valanciunas can totally wipe out the necessity for a player such as Gray by the end of the year. In theory, Valanciunas promises to be a hybrid big man — one that can run the floor as well as Johnson but can hunker down in the paint nearly as well as the lumbering Gray. Even Casey said Valanciunas’s addition would make things more “complex.”

In the debut, Johnson was one of the better Raptors, with 12 points and six rebounds in 14 minutes. Casey credited him and Davis — who grabbed a team-high 10 rebounds — with changing the pace of the game. Gray was his space-eating self, collecting eight rebounds.

While Valanciunas could not play, his fellow rookie, Terrence Ross, had a nice debut. He had 10 points.

“I can’t make any mistakes,” Ross said of his defence before the game.

“Typical rookie: a couple of brain locks as far as not knowing where he was supposed to be in offensive sets,” Casey said after the game. “Typical rookie mistakes. But he did a good job of going to his strength, which is shooting the ball.

What Casey would not give for being able to see his more eagerly anticipated first-year player make his gaffes.